24505

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 10:31

Mostly a puzzle of about average difficulty from the speed-merchant’s viewpoint, with one answer that I took an extra minute or two to find – 9A, where the E?O??R?I?R pattern didn’t suggest anything until I saw ECO- = “green”.

Across
1 AUTOBAHN – (about an, H=hour)* – “it takes continental drivers” is one of several definitions that deviate from the obvious and blend into the surface meaning
5 STAFF = man (verb),A = area. Staffa is the island with Fingal’s Cave – cue music and pictures
8 today’s deliberate omission – ask if you can’t see/explain the answer
9 E = (musical) note, COWAR(d) = “short Noel”,RIOR = “Riordan disposing of Dan”. “Green in a fight” is the definition. The wordplay seems obvious now but I suspect others may also have wasted time looking for anagrams of “Noel Riorda(n)” or similar
10 RING DOWN – 2 definitions
11 TEHRAN – Eh = “come again”, in TRA(i)N – coach = TRAIN is from the verb meanings rather than a loose railway association
12 TOYS – reversed first letters of “seven year old tax”. I wondered whether “toy” and “fiddle” were precise synonyms as verbs, but when both are followed by “with”, I think they are.
14 IN FAVOUR OF = pro – O=old in (run off via)*
17 MAD = hopping, A (GAS) CAR – “island hopping” was quite deceptive, but then the mention of the vehicle and fuel gave away one of the Times crossword setters’ favourite islands (with Staffa). Not totally conviced that “hopping” means “mad” without “mad” next to it.
20 EWER = pitcher – W = wicket replaces V = “very short” in EVER = for good (usually “for ever”, but I think there’s a poetic “ever” meaning the same). The hybrid cricket/baseball wordplay is the first of a couple of unstated transatlantic equalities today
23 A(R)CHED – ached = “did long”
24 ILL = wrong (I), NO., 1’S
25 PIP = seed, EOPENER = OPEN (tournament), in E’ER = always
26 CHA = tea = drink – H in reversal of a/c = account = bill
27 CAN,YON=”that”
28 PED(EST.)AL – “work cycle” = operate a bicycle = PEDAL
 
Down
1 ALGORIT = (to a girl)*, H.M. = Her Majesty = Queen
2 T(Y)RANNY – youngsters may need telling that back in the 1950s, when a standard radio was a hulking great thing with valves, a transistor radio or “tranny” was as new and exciting as an iPod today
3 BR(END=bottom)A – a nice cheeky new variant on the well-worn BRA track
4 HOOD = bonnet (US and UK car parts), WINKS = flashes (in relation to light) – “has”, as in “You’ve been had” is the def.
5 SARATOV – a city in Southern Russia, and (a vast or)*
6 A(C)ID (aid = ” a hand”),HOUSE (vb.) = “put up”
7 FAR = rev. of R.A.F., RA = gunners, GO = leave. 30 years ago, “gunners = RA” was a huge crossword cliché, but the modern Times puzzle avoids it so much that some of you may need “RA = Royal Artillery” to see why.
13 SLAP = cuff, HAPPY = “unlike a lot of policemen” – I misread this at first, missing the “not” and thinking of the Laughing Policeman. Just as I was revving up to moan about laughing=happy, I saw the light – these policemen are from The Pirates of Penzance, and their lot is not a happy one (version to match the US/UK blending mentioned above)
15 A TAG = “a label”, LANCE = “cut” – Upon quick butcher’s” is the def., using Cockney rhyming slang “butcher’s (hook)” = look
16 FORESTALL = check – which we make by tipping = reversing “of”, then adding REST (as in snooker) = prop, and ALL = thoroughly – if I were the Tmes xwd ed, I think I’d change “thoroughly” to “completely”.
18 A GRIP = a firm hold, P.A. = per annum = a year – here’s Agrippa
19 AND SO ON = etc. – O = love, in ‘ANDS ON = “offering practical experience in the East End”
21 WOOD = (golf) club, CUT = “to stop filming”
22 PIER = “what Brighton has” (it had two until the West pier fell into disuse), CE = reverse of EC = City (postcode for City of London) – “to go through” is our last carefully-chosen definition

28 comments on “24505”

  1. 10:31 is staggering for this.
    2 hours (at least) for me. As each clue slowly fell I, as per usual, marked those which might be nominated COD, but after about 10 were marked it seemed pointless. Just brilliant and had me running the gamut of emotions from despair to euphoria.
  2. A number there I didn’t find all the rationale for: a bad shot at the Russian city anagram didn’t help either. An enjoyable wrench at 37 min.
  3. I lost most of my quality soliving time before leaving for work today and then I had distractions on the move so I didn’t get a proper run at this one.

    In several sessions spread over 50 minutes I solved all but 9 across. Then I used two solvers which didn’t return anything on E?O??R?I?R so I gave up. ECOWARRIOR appeared in another puzzle recently, possibly in the ST and I solved it then without difficulty so I imagine the clue was more helpful than today’s.

  4. clues with attainable answers but struggle to justify even when you know. Taken back to the bad old days. Couldn’t find satisfactory reference for Pipe Opener nor could i match Ring Down with curtain.
    Great aversion therapy this
  5. A well constructed puzzle of about average difficulty – 25 minutes to solve and no real quibbles or hang ups. I thought ECOWARRIOR was a completely logical wordplay – decide on the definition and then just do what the clue tells you and remember to ignore the capital letters. I thought PIPE-OPENER was a bit harder because I didn’t recall it as a phrase meaning a practice match but the wordplay was again very specific and fair. Nice puzzle.
    2. It’s a reference to Noel Coward, the actor, director and playwright; short, since he loses the last letter of his surname.
  7. Failed in the NW, with RING DOWN being the main culprit as I’m one of those people who’s never managed to train myself away from ‘bring down’. I also had to cheat on SARATOV. It was interesting to me that apart from Moscow and Petersburg, no other Russian city has 2 million inhabitants. And most of the top ten I hadn’t heard of.

    I’m not sure if I should be going here, but could someone explain the significance of ‘inappropriate’ in the lingerie question.

    1. Assuming that underwear = bra & panties, a female bottom … (you can do the rest)
      1. I feel chastened, nay, mortified; especially, since I know that no one’s going to admit they were also fumbling about with the loose ends.
  9. Probably because I was under a different kind of time pressure (needed for grandson sitting) I didn’t take to this at all. FORESTALL one of several that went in unexplained – thanks for an excellent blog, by the way – and PIPE OPENER sounds like one of those hearty Edwardian expressions that dropped out of favour about a century ago. ECO wotsit had me flummoxed, and since I hadn’t heard of SARATOV (admittedly it couldn’t be anything else) the cluing wasn’t any help – one of those where if you manage to guess the answer you spend ages wondering how the thing works. On another day, I’d have thought this brilliant, but not today!
  10. Peter – 10.31 is astonishing for this – you must have got a lot AT A GLANCE.

    This puzzle felt like a geography exam (STAFFA, MADAGASCAR, ILLINOIS, TEHRAN, SARATOV) and the few I managed took ages.

    Stymied myself in the NW corner by putting LOGARITHM for 1D, knowing full well it didn’t fit the definition but not rethinking. Didn’t therefore get AUTOBAHN, BRENDA or HOODWINKS. Grrr!

    PIPE OPENER is a new word for me, but gettable from the wordplay.

    Good to see a golf-ish reference (WOODcut) on the eve of the Masters. C’mon Lee Westwood..!

    1. Replying to a random “great time” comment:

      I know I saw 5A and 8 on first look, and I think I got 2 and 5D from them. Then 12 was easy, and 17 fell as described above. At that point you’ve got enough momentum not to realise that it’s a puzzle others will find difficult. There’s also a benefit of experience – answers like MADAGASCAR, ILLINOIS, AGRIPPA and CHA are not exactly clichés but come up just that bit more often than they might, and the brains of the old hands somehow store this away. And tiny weaknesses in the surface meaning can tell you a lot – “I state” rather than “I say” in 24A is one example, and “A vast, or …” rather than “Vast or …” at the beginning of 5D is another.

  11. 16 mins (hard to be exact as I was interrupted twice). I agree that Peter’s 10:31 is exceptional. Mind, I didn’t help myself by falling into the LOGARITHM and OSTRAVA elephant traps, even though I was sure the latter wasn’t in Russia. An entertaining puzzle.
  12. 21:45 .. tricky but good.

    Nice to see setters saving me the trouble of a One Across Rock – Kraftwerk, indeed.

    It took me some time to find a foothold in this one, but a foothold came courtesy of unearthly boy wonder Alex Guttenplan. I’d just watched him do to St John’s College what Lionel Messi last night did to Arsenal, and read this back-handed homage which left STAFFA fresh in my mind. Like the author of that piece, the highlights of my last few weeks have been the rare occasions on which I knew something Alex Guttenplan didn’t. He really, really needs a girlfriend.

    1. Such a “British” article that by Sam Wollaston. Last year it was Gail Trimble who had the “It’s intellectual totty Jim: not as we know it” treatment from the tabloid Spocks, now we have the hip faux-jealousy from Mr W.
      What occurred to me watching AG on UC was the engaging way he said “I don’t know” on the rare occasion he didn’t er know
  13. This was a long hard solve. I really enjoyed ecowarrior, probably because I solved it quite quickly, and the lot of policemen in slap-happy. I finished with Teheran because, at 7, I had initially reversed the gunners as well as the airmen to get farargo.

    This was an excellent puzzle although it was, perhaps, over-reliant on proper nouns. Also, I was not happy with cut=lance in 15. Most dictionaries define lance as pierce but it scrapes through on the COED definition “prick or cut open”.

  14. I found this a huge slog – couldn’t finish it last night, and took a bit longer after I woke up, but sneaked home with SARATOV last in.

    Nice to see HM (anyone else pencil in ER at the end of 1 down and get stuck a while?), but I don’t feel great since there were a lot I got from one part of the clue but not the other. RING DOWN from wordplay, PIPE OPENER from wordplay, AGRIPPA from definition, AND SO ON from definition, SARATOV from wordplay, ACID HOUSE from definition, FORESTALL from definition. That’s a mess… great time Peter.

  15. 40 mins for me. here in US we use the phrase pipe-cleaner to mean something simple pushed through a process (such as software for designing a circuit board) to make sure it works cleanly, so that led me to pipe-opener (luckily cleaner didn’t fit).
  16. Over 90 minutes which is a long time!
    still dont follow why Bra is inappropriate
    i finally got Staffa but also think that Rhodes would be a good answer!
    Thought EcoWarrior was as truggle and not sure i see the double definition of ring down for curtain i thought this was bring down…could someone please explain both this and 3 down

    Thank you

    1. At least in the Oxford Dictionary of English, you can ring (and not bring) the curtain up or down.

      The bra is “inappropriate” because most girls wear something else on their bottom.

  17. Tough puzzle, which seemed it might be easy at the start when I solved quite a few quickly, 52 mins. COD HOODWINKS, also esp liked MADAGASCAR, PEDESTAL, ALGORITHM, BRENDA.
  18. Tough for me, about 50 minutes, last entry being PIERCE, right after the crafty ECOWARRIOR. Didn’t know: PIPE-OPENER, and I thought you spell the Asian city as “Teheran”, since US newspapers spell it that way. Got TYRANNY and FORESTALL from definitions alone, not seeing the ‘tranny’=radio or ‘prop’=rest devices. Overall, I thought most of this was clever. I didn’t catch the inappropriate underwear either until PB explained above; Maestrotempus, the bra is not the right underwear to be fit on the girl’s bottom, thus it’s inappropriate. I think the COD has to go to the green in a fight, although for its deceptive ‘island hopping’ the MADAGASCAR clue rates high marks too. Regards.
  19. I was another who found this at the tougher end of the scale, solved in 26:18. I was very tired after a sleepless night though, so probably wasn’t on top form. I had numerous guesses at 5D, starting with OSTRAVA. SARATOV was my 4th attempt, after which the NE corner came together. I thought of ECOWARRIOR from the definition immediately, but took a long time to see how it worked so it didn’t go in until it could hardly be anything else! I also struggled with BRENDA but got the joke when I saw it.

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